“Yes. It does.”
“Then you’re not really worried about Laura’s peace, are you? You’re worried about your own.”
Bex shakes the water from her hands—directly into my face. “You make it very difficult to like you.”
I follow her out of the bathroom and into the parking lot. I don’t protest her statement. I respect her for the acknowledgment. She gets me. There may be hope for us to be friends after all.
We climb into the backseat of the BMW in the parking lot. The car belongs to Laura’s ex, Jason. He and Jamal sit in the front seat, a not very subtle attempt to give Bex and I “girl bonding” time on the drive up to New York City. I’ve chosen to sleep through the car ride instead. I’m no bond girl.
I wasn’t given a choice about making this trip. Jamal awoke me at four in the morning by throwing pebbles at my bedroom window. Usually the pebble-throwing means he wants to wake me for a middle-of-the-night trip to IHOP, so I hopped right out of bed and jumped into the waiting car without questions. It was already moving by the time I realized both Jason and Bex were also in it, and the car was already leaving the District before I realized we were headed toward I-95 and not toward IHOP.
“What the . . . ?” I grumbled.
I need to stop choosing based on my stomach and my heart. I wish I could learn to turn those off.
“We’ve Miles-napped you,” Jamal stated. “We’re taking you on an adventure. Four hours up and away to the city that doesn’t sleep.”
“But . . . ,” I started to protest.
“Don’t worry, we cleared it with your dad first,” Bex said.
“I wasn’t worried,” I snapped. Like I needed Buddy’s permission to go somewhere I didn’t even want to go to. I pretended to fall back asleep until I actually did.
Back on the road after the pit stop, we’re soon driving through a section of New Jersey highway that’s surrounded by power plants and swamps, and smells of raw sewage. The view from the car window looks like the cover art on an apocalyptic, hell dimension sci-fi novel.
“This is the part she loved,” Bex says.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“Laura. You know how the past few years she and I took a trip together to New York City every summer? Whenever we drove past this one part that’s all scary-looking, she would squeal, ‘Pretty!’ See that over there?” Bex points to the view of skyscrapers looming over the horizon. “That’s the part I love about the drive up here. The moment when Manhattan beckons in the distance. When you know something amazing is going to happen. There.”
Bex has been beckoned.
It’s a good thing I can make myself laugh.
I like my quiet, sleepy D.C. city, but I almost envy Bex her courage in taking on that skyscraper city across the way. Even from this distance, where I can feel that city’s pulse and pull, I can imagine that Bex will indeed have amazing experiences at university in NYC. Please let her not pull Jamal there too. It’s been hard enough imagining losing him to Atlanta, but losing him to New York and to this particular girl—it’s too much.
Jason and Jamal are discussing the report from the sports radio station—they’re not paying attention to the girls in the backseat. I can speak freely. I turn to Bex. “Do you realize that just this past year alone, your father has voted against immigrant and gay rights bills, made sure the proposed measures didn’t even make it out of committee and onto the floor of the House? Do you also know that he repeatedly rejects overtures from D.C.’s token delegate to the House, who, by the way, is not even a real representative—the delegate might as well be a eunuch—to discuss support for a constitutional amendment granting D.C. statehood—”
“Eunuch?” Bex bursts into laughter. “You didn’t just say that.”
I sort of want to be beckoned into sharing her laughter, but I will not. Eunuch. Could I be more of an idiot? I will never make a great orator, obviously. Though with the sensual appeal I hold to the opposite sex, I myself may as well be a eunuch. Maybe I’ll just run for D.C. delegate one day instead. Same end result.
“Seriously,” I say. “What is with your father’s—and his party’s—refusal to acknowledge the voting rights of D.C. citizens?”
“What is with your habit of apparently swiping and reading Jim’s issues of Congressional Record too much?” How did she know I do that! Maybe it was just a good guess. Bex takes a deep breath, then blows her steam. “First, it’s completely inappropriate that you—or anyone—would hold me accountable for my father’s politics. His opinions and beliefs are his own, and mine are mine. Sometimes I agree with his politics, more often I don’t. It’s an ongoing debate in my family—but a good one, I like to think. Every step away from the right and toward the center that my father takes, who do you think is pushing him there? Me. Second, I often spend parts of my school vacations working in his office, and I happen to know that whatever you may think about his voting record, he’s been one of the most active behind-the-scenes members of the House to support D.C. statehood. He just personally doesn’t get along with the D.C. delegate. But he has, in fact, traded support on certain measures with several Maryland representatives in order to line up their recommendations for a retrocession measure to study whether D.C. could become part of Maryland. Retrocession would allow for a capital city around the Mall for the federal government, but extend Maryland’s borders inside the District so that its citizens are granted the same state’s rights—and responsibilities—as citizens in any other state. So Dad doesn’t just have his own state’s constituents he’s working for—he’s also advocating for those in Maryland and D.C., even if he’s not browbeating publicly about it just so he can look like a good guy to the city. Satisfied?”
Absolutely not satisfied. “Maryland was originally settled as a refuge for Catholics in Protestant England, and that Catholic influence is still there. Separation of church and state means—”
“Oh, my God.”
“What?”
“All this time I wished you would just talk to me, give me the time of day. Now I just wish you would shut up.”
A laugh finally lets loose from me.
Quietly, Bex adds, “You sound like Laura. On her better days. The fighter ones.”
We return to silence.
The city overwhelms me. So many people, so much noise, so much rush—I do not want to be here, not without Laura to share the experience. This was a city Laura loved, with theater and shopping and a landscape she adored, a place where, as she would report when she returned home to me, she could go to feel alive.
The boys brought me here on false pretenses—they don’t want to be here either. After parking his car in the garage at Jason’s grandmother’s building, Jason and Jamal immediately hop onto the subway to the Bronx, to go see a Yankees-Red Sox game.
So now not only has Jamal deserted me in favor of Bex, he’s deposited me with her as well. Miles is not enjoying being Miles-napped.
“Strand Bookstore?” Bex asks as we stand outside the subway station into which Jason and Jamal have retreated. “Want to go there? It was a favorite of Laura’s.”
“I never heard her mention the place.”
“‘Miles and Miles of Books.’ Does that sound familiar?”
I can hear Laura’s voice now: I went miles and miles to go to Miles and Miles to bring back books for Miles, my Miles. She’d sing this to me in the tree house while she handed over a stack of paperback novels in exchange for a nickel bag. She liked to smoke the herb but not to hunt for it herself, whereas I got scolded for hunting inside too many books. It was a good exchange.
“No,” I say to Bex. “I don’t want to go there. I want to go anywhere that’s outside, where I can smoke.”
“I know just the place.”
Bex plays tour guide, winding us to the Morningside Heights neighborhood and over to the long, wide steps of Low Library at Columbia University, where we sit down behind a statue called “Alma Mater” so I can catch up on my bad habits: s
mokes and Cokes. From our perch on the steps, we observe the central campus of stately libraries, classroom buildings, and dorms, green lawns with Frisbee and soccer players, families with small children ambling across the central path Bex says is named “College Walk.” The campus is magnificent, I have to admit—an academic oasis planted within terra firma Manhattan. A community.
The view elicits the same reaction in Bex and me. It’s not something we can control. The tears happen at such random, unexpected times.
We are looking at the future life Laura was supposed to experience, only hers would have been the Georgetown Hoya version.
“Laura and I came to this exact spot last summer,” Bex says. “I wanted to show her where I wanted to go to college, take her to the spot where my parents met. And the weird thing is? We’re sitting here now, I know Laura and I sat here before, and yet I’m not sure the memory is real. Am I missing her so much that I created a happy memory of us here? Was she really with Jason, at a Broadway show, while I came here for the campus visit that day? Or am I really remembering the time we came up here and she was feeling too blue and wouldn’t get out of the car, when she asked us to leave her alone so she could nap in the car while Jason and I went sightseeing?”
“I know. Sometimes I’m smoking up in the tree house and I realize I’m talking to her like she’s there, recreating conversations we had in the past—only then I ask myself if Laura and I really did have that conversation, or if I only meant to with her. Before.”
It’s news to me that I could share Laura with Bex.
But Bex loved her as much as I did. I could trust Bex on this level.
“Yes. That’s exactly it.” Bex reaches over for the cigarette in my hand, takes a drag off it, and exhales with no cough (clearly she’s experienced), then hands the cigarette back to me. “I’m so relieved you feel that way. I keep wondering if I’m just going crazy.”
“Jason,” is all I say. Wondering if Bex and I could move up a level. Will she know the question already?
She does. “I think Laura loved him without being in love with him. It’s like, maybe Jason offered her a protection from herself. I mean, he’s a nice-enough guy, but . . .” She pauses, like she’s hesitant whether to say what she really thinks. Say it, Bex. We both know it. Amazingly, she does: “There’s no there there with him. He wasn’t a challenge as a boyfriend; being with him was simple. He let in light when she was trying to suppress her own darkness.”
“You mean he flanked her?”
“‘Flanked’? Where do you get these weird words? But flanked—I guess that’s it. Laura could hide behind him.” Bex takes my cigarette again, takes another drag, passes it back again. “What about you? Is there any guy you like?”
Emphatically no. There’s a boy I love. She took him.
The question pries too deep. Bex really doesn’t understand the tiers.
I shake my head. “What about that stoner Floyd guy?” she asks. “I think he likes you.”
I shake my head again. “Good call,” Bex says. “That guy’s bad news.”
Not like Floyd deserves being defended, but still . . . come on! “You didn’t think he was bad news that night at Crash Landing when you were getting up close and personal on the dance floor with Jamal while people were spread out everywhere using pretty much every kind of drug you could think of.”
“I did think Floyd was bad news. I just didn’t care that night. It was Jamal’s idea to go there. He didn’t want you to be alone so much so soon after, but he didn’t think you’d agree to go out anywhere else. And I was at a point where I needed something—anything—to help shake off the sadness. So I danced, but I didn’t do any drugs. I don’t do that. But, listen, okay? That Floyd definitely likes you. Jamal thinks so too. But Floyd is not the type of guy any girl who wants to live past twenty should be going out with. You could do so much better.”
Only I can’t, and we both know that.
I laugh, the bitter kind. I guess Jamal does love me, in his way. Shaggy, I’ve figured it out. The case of Miles-napping was a setup by Jamal: to give his girlfriend time to talk with me about Laura, and to have a girl set me straight about a bad boy. No way does Bex care whether I continue to hang out with that Floyd guy. No way there’s even a guy out there who’d be interested in me, so what’s it matter? Pass me a Scooby snack.
“Can I ask you something?” Bex says. This time she takes my cigarette and finishes it off.
“I think you’re going to ask whether I say it’s okay or not, so why not go for it.” Like you just did, leveling off my cigarette.
Bex looks at me, hopeful in her perky brunette way. “Is it okay? Me and Jamal?”
“Okay how?” It’s not okay in any way.
“Okay with you. I know what’s going on between him and me is sudden, and strange, but it’s intense, and feels real. Only I don’t want to come between you and him and . . . you know . . . your friendship with him?” That word, “friendship.” What is she really saying/asking? I have no idea. Or I do, and I deny.
Bex could not possibly know what I feel for Jamal; anybody who could give someone a name like “8 Mile” would have to be assuming a heavy girl would naturally understand that an 8 Mile’s deep feelings for a boy could never be reciprocated. The boy goes to the girl like her.
Our trust will not extend into this realm. “Your relationship with Jamal isn’t for me to sanction. He’d be the first to tell you that.”
“He has. It’s just . . . I don’t want there to be bad feeling between us. We care for the same people. And I want you on my side. Because Jamal’s family, you know . . . they don’t like me.”
Really?!?!
“Well, they wouldn’t share your dad’s politics,” I say. I’m sure that’s all it is. They welcome everybody.
“It’s not that.”
Really?!?!
“Then what is it?”
“I mean, they like me. Just not with Jamal. They don’t say it outright. But I sense it. There’s a coldness. It was okay for me to tutor their daughter, to make friends with their son—but to date him? I’m on the wrong side of the color line.”
Finally, it’s my turn to be on the receiving end of a little piece of peace. Bex has everything: the privilege, the future, the skinny body, the boy. So if the boy’s family chooses not to accept her, I have no problem with that. They accept me.
A Nap with Miles
THE DREAM IS REAL WHILE YOU’RE IN IT.
All those finger-waggers admonishing about what not to do—Don’t do drugs! Don’t smoke! Don’t drink!—completely miss that there’s a reason people do these vices. They feel good, in the moment. The risks and consequences—addiction, disease, a life spiraling downward out of control, even death—don’t matter when you’re inside the do.
Inside my nicey-nice dream, here’s what didn’t happen: Bex and Jamal did not sit opposite me and Jason through dinner at a restaurant near Columbia University after the Yankees game, kissing and laughing like they were their own private universe. After dinner, Jason did not settle his arm along the wide berth of my shoulder as we walked like the old pals we’re not down Riverside Park alongside the Hudson River, behind Bex and Jamal, who were oblivious to me and Jason—touching! for no reason!—and to the fact that the stares their coupleness generated from people had as much to do with the cocoa-vanilla clasp of their hands as with how attractive they both are. When we reached the Riverside Drive penthouse apartment of Jason’s grandmother, away on Martha’s Vineyard for the summer, Bex and Jamal did not immediately retreat into the guest bedroom for privacy.
Grandparents really ought not to leave empty apartments to young adults. The naughty games kids play.
I may have been Miles-napped, but I did not travel unprepared. I’ve abstained since that night at Crash Landing, so the next high could be extra good. This is why doers need to take time off. So the coming back can be even better—a victory lap. Earned.
What I do when Jason and I stand alone together
in the living room, abandoned, is share with him, from Laura’s stash. We sort through the baggie like it’s Halloween candy, and settle on two hydros each. It’s a sleepover, with no accountability to anyone but ourselves in the morning. We can get as wasted as we want.
We nap but don’t nap. We are content. The time-out is about the velvet-smooth feeling, not about the ghost who binds and brought us all here together tonight, she whose absence has so quickly made us so much older, and harder, and sadder.
Because we quickly transport to the dream, the best, best kind, double-dosed, I have no hesitation about doubling up next to Jason on the living room rug. I am not the pudgy, unattractive, unpopular high school girl sharing a secret, intimate moment with the Ivy League, preppy-handsome guy. I am me but not really me. In this moment, I am light, and free, and perfect. Wanted.
We’re lodged on a floor but floating on a penthouse cloud. Jason and I lie next to one another, on our sides, fully clothed, staring at one another, silently ruminating on our Deep Thoughts without the need to speak. Except when one of us does.
“I never noticed you were so pretty before,” Jason murmurs. “Your blue eyes look just like hers.” Inside the dream, the real meaning of what he just said is not, Too bad you don’t have her figure, too.
“Toes,” I say. “I like when you feel it in your toes.” It’s the best part of the high, in my opinion—when the tingle creeps up from your toes, signaling its intent to spread lovingly throughout your body.
Jason reaches for a remote control nestled under a sofa cushion, then presses a button so that his grandmother’s classical music starts playing from a stereo. Mozart and hydros: not such a match. So much symphonic furor, it’s like führerlike. But any noise that can drown out the beat of headboard-banging, and the sharp, grunting sounds of dreamlovers’ ecstasy coming from the other room, is welcome indeed. Heil.
Jason’s hand moves to touch my cheek.
Outside the dream, I felt sure I would float through my entire life, never touched.